THE SMALL THINGSChocolate Factory, London SE1Opened 3 February, 2005***

An Englishman, an Irishman and two Scotsmen walk into a theatre season...
I'm sorry, but it's too good an opening line to pass up, especially when
this is the superficially inappropriate composition of the playwrights
in the Paines Plough company's "This Other England" strand. As it happens,
though, the unifying theme is not national identity itself but rather the
English language as a factor therein.

The season begins with The Small Things by Cork-born Enda Walsh.
For the first half or so of its 65 minutes, it seems a straight mix of
Samuel Beckett and Alan Bennett. An elderly man and woman sit in armchairs,
taking turns with monologic accounts of their childhoods together in a
small village (the location is never specified, but the accents are Lancashire).
There's a window on to who knows what à la Endgame, alarm
bells as cues à la Happy Days, but also banal stories about
meringues and the public swimming pool such as might be recounted by one
of Bennett's Talking Heads. Every so often one or other will savour
a word – "lumpen", "languid" – in a way that suggests the point of Walsh's
piece might be language's ability to enrich even such unexceptional events
as they speak of.

Just as we are lulled, matters darken rapidly; the cracked obsession
of the woman's father becomes a messianic drive to turn the village into
a regiment of mute time-and-motion robots, and we're pitched into a picture
somewhere between Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and an intimate
Holocaust. Language, we realise – and in particular, banality, the ability
to chat inconsequentially – is now a redeeming emblem of humanity. Later
still, it serves as a betrayer, after which the once-again-Beckettian coda
comes as little surprise.

After what I felt was the disappointment of Bedbound, this is
Walsh returning to the prime form he showed in his UK début Disco
Pigs. He creates a world which is at once fantastical and only a quarter-turn
from the most ordinary of ordinaries, yet also seldom more than a whisper
from real menace. Outgoing artistic director Vicky Featherstone's production
discreetly emphasises the slight separateness of characters and events:
on Neil Warmington's set, no object actually rests on the surface beneath
it. Ultimately, though, the same separateness informs one's response to
the piece: it's fascinating, but it doesn't strike feelingly.